A Love That Never Tires (38 page)

“I’m sure you’re glad to have Schoville back,” Patrick whispered to Linley. “I must admit, I was a little worried what might happen to us without him. But now we are back to three. And three can manage just fine.”

He smoothed her hair back from her face and kissed her temple. Her eyes were open that day, and even though she never responded, Patrick liked to think she could still see and hear him. For good measure, he hummed a few bars of
Steamboat Bill
, just for her.

As content as Patrick was to hold her in his arms all day, the fact of the matter was that Linley needed to be washed and dressed. So he maneuvered as best he could with her still on his lap to pour a little of their drinking water into the small enamelware bowl they used for cooking. After placing the bowl of water near the fire to warm, Patrick dug through Linley’s bag for the bar of strong soap and flannel he knew she kept there.

He tested the water with his fingers, and finding it warm enough, dipped the cloth all the way in. Once the flannel was wet and soapy, Patrick gently folded back the rough blanket covering Linley’s body. It was then that he first saw her—really saw her—naked in full daylight.

Patrick studied her, not with the lusty eyes of a lover, but with something more akin to pride. He ran the warm cloth over her body, marveling at the soft taper of her long, slender arms. The webbing of blue veins across each little breast. The ridges and hollows of her ribcage. And, finally, the ten pink toes, each with their own little nail, making up the tips of her feet.

He felt as if, in some small way, he was responsible for the young woman she had become. That he had somehow shaped each individual piece of her.

Those lips were made to meet his. Her ears were made to hear him. Her eyes to see him. Her hands to touch him.

He felt they had once been two halves of a perfect whole, pulled apart and set aside, only to reunite as man and woman on this imperfect Earth.

Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

And once brought together again, they could no longer survive separately.

“I should like you to come stay at Wolford Abbey,” he said to her. “Only for a little while, until you regain your strength.” He dumped out the bowl of dirty water and placed her soap and flannel back in her leather pack. “I know I told you about the library and the chapel, but you still haven’t heard about the gardens or the tennis court…”

Patrick trailed off as Schoville emerged from the tent.

“We’d better get going,” Schoville said, stretching and twisting his battered body. “No sense in wasting the entire day loafing around.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a few hours of sleep?”

He shook his head. “I’m halfway to pneumonia by now, at any rate.”

“All the more reason to rest,” Patrick said. “Regain your strength.”

“I’d rather keep moving, if it’s all the same to you. We aren’t doing Linley any favors sitting in one spot.”

Patrick couldn’t help but agree. He finished repacking everything he’d hung out to dry the night before, and, after pulling down the tent and dousing the fire, gathered Linley into his arms for the long walk ahead.

Carrying her by stretcher had proved difficult, but moving her by hand was much, much harder. Patrick’s arms throbbed from fighting with the river the day before. An hour into their march, his entire upper body shook from the effort it took to carry her. Plus, he kept having to stop to adjust Linley’s head so that she did not flop around like a ragdoll.

Schoville walked a few steps ahead, stopping now and then to let the slower man catch up. “I can carry her for a while,” he said as he watched Patrick struggle.

“No, thank you. I’m managing just fine.”

“You look like you’re about to have an apoplexy.”

Patrick blew out his breath. “I’m as healthy as a horse.”

“More like a broken-down nag.”

He shifted Linley against his chest. “Hardly! If it wasn’t for these blasted wet boots I’m walking in, you’d be having to try and keep up with me.”

“Wet boots,” Schoville scoffed. “When you’ve walked all night in freezing cold, sopping wet clothes, only to get up the next morning and do it all over again in damp ones, then you can complain to me. Until then, I have no sympathy for you.”

Patrick ought to have been used to it all by then. It was over a month since he first came to India, first rode elephants, and first experienced the relentless beating rains of monsoon season. First felt the sticky wetness that clung to the very air he breathed. His only respite from it had been at the monastery, perched high above the clouds.

But not even that had been pleasant. He’d had too much on his mind to even think about the weather. Or lack of weather. Or anything at all, really. He was too busy running from Linley then, when what he really should’ve done was run straight to her.

Right into her open, willing arms.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Neither Patrick nor Schoville ate anything that day, since all their food had been contaminated with river water.

They lost the map, as well—another sacrifice to the water gods.

With little energy and no way to tell if they were headed in the right direction, Schoville decided they would set up camp before nightfall and worry about making up for lost time the next morning.

“If this mission camp is where the old Lama said it was,” he explained. “We should be getting close.”

Patrick did not bother looking up as he hammered tent stakes into the soft, gooey ground. “He told me it was four or five days walk. But even then, he couldn’t guarantee the missionaries would still be there. They might have cleared out before the rains came.”

“Even if they have gone, we can still use their shelter.” Schoville’s stomach made a strange, gurgling noise. He put his hand over it to dampen the noise. “And with a little luck, they might have left some supplies behind.”

Patrick was too preoccupied to reply, as he had just went to work examining his swollen, itchy feet. Walking all day in wet socks and boots definitely took its toll, it seemed. And, to be honest, they hurt like the blazes.

“How are your feet holding up?” he asked Schoville.

“My feet?” The man bent down to have a look at his own gangly trotters. “A bit pruny, perhaps. Why? What’s wrong with yours?”

“I don’t know. They’re very itchy.”

Schoville leaned over the fire to see for himself. “Probably nothing. But if it keeps up, you might want to piss on them.”

“Piss on them?” Patrick asked. “Piss on my own feet?”

“Sometimes we pick up ringworms and the like. Bedford swears that the best cure is urine, and in my experience, he’s right.”

Patrick wrinkled his nose. “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”

From inside the tent, came a low guttural moan. Both men turned around at the sound.

“I hate when she does that,” Patrick said. “I always hope she’s waking up.”

“I hate it when she seems to follow me around with her eyes.” Schoville stabbed at the fire with a long stick, kicking up embers into the night sky. “But I know she doesn’t see me.”

Patrick watched as the orange flakes drifted up into the tree canopy and fizzled out. “She has to be hungry. She hasn’t had anything to eat in days. I’ve only gone one day without a meal, and I know I’m starving.”

“You and I can make it quite a while as long as we have clean water, but I don’t know how much longer Linley can go. She needs a doctor that can give her fluids.”

“Will there be any lasting damage, do you think?” he asked. “With a fever this high, for this long, without anything to eat or drink?”

Schoville shrugged. “Who can say?”

God help Linley if she were to become an invalid. Patrick shuddered at the thought of her spending the rest of her life in a nursing home. The indignities she would face there…

No. If it came to that, he would see to it she had a private nurse. A team of private nurses, all caring for her around the clock in one of the unused bedrooms at Wolford Abbey. Surely, Bedford would not object to that. Not if he knew what horrors awaited her in a nursing home.

“Every day, you dress her, and bathe her, and change her,” Schoville said. “And you almost look happy to do it.”

“I don’t think ‘happy’ is quite the word for it,” Patrick replied. “But, until she comes out of this stupor she’s in, I owe it to her to see that she is clean and properly cared for.”

Schoville poked at the fire some more. He started to open his mouth, but then shut it. It took him two or three more tries to get what he wanted to say out. “You’ve slept with her.”

It wasn’t a question. Patrick knew that much. “I don’t see how it is any of your business.”

“It’s not my business. But I’m not asking out of loyalty to Linley, or any personal dislike for you. I’m asking because she’s a woman and you’re a man, and she needs someone to make sure you are held accountable.”

Patrick chewed on that for a minute, but he still did not answer.

“You’d better be glad it was me who found out and not Reginald or Archie,” Schoville said, refusing to let the other man off so easily. “Or, God forbid, Bedford. It would kill him.”

Patrick cleared his throat and spoke up. “I’m not too worried about Bedford. He and I seem to have come to an understanding.”

There was another long silence.

Again, Schoville poked the fire. “Will you marry her?”

“Linley doesn’t want to marry me,” Patrick said. “I have nothing to offer her. Nothing she would want.” He looked across the fire at the other man. “Besides, marriage would ruin everything that is free about her. It would snuff it right out.”

“You don’t have a very high regard for the institution, do you?”

He sighed as if the confession was torn out of him. “The truth is, I couldn’t marry her even if she would have me. I am desperate for money. And the only way I can get it is if I whore myself out to an heiress. Grit my teeth and bed a girl for her money, when what I really want to do is…” And then it hit him—the undeniable truth. “…when what I really want to do is be with Linley.”

At that moment, Schoville did something he never thought he would do. He felt sorry for the man. And worst of all, he felt sorry for Linley. “Does she know all that?”

“I’ve explained it to her, and she seems fine with it. But, to be honest, I really don’t know if she understands what it will mean.”

They both looked over at Linley.

“I hate it for her,” Schoville said. “Even though she’d never admit it, I know she is lonely. But Linley will never leave Bedford. He’s all she’s got.”

***

The choking heat of early morning drove Patrick out of the tent not long after dawn. Outside, the little campfire had long been snuffed out by the rain, but the ground and the trees still steamed from the wet, hot air.

Schoville was nowhere to be found.

Fighting down gnashing hunger pangs, Patrick dragged Linley out of the tent and went about tearing down the campsite. He could already tell the day would be a hot one, and they couldn’t afford to waste any time, wherever Schoville might be.

But as Patrick moved around the camp, the pains in his stomach were not the only ones racking is body—his feet hurt, as well.

The redness and swelling had not gone down overnight, even though he made sure to sleep with his socks off to air his feet out. And blisters were a common enough occurrence over the past few weeks, but he’d never seen any quite as…oozy…as the ones between his toes that morning.

Perhaps he should not have picked at them so much the night before.

“That talcum powder would come in nicely right about now,” Patrick said to Linley as he slipped on his boots. What a shame he used it all on the way to the monastery. The thought of conserving any of it for the trip back never occurred to him.

How naïve the old Patrick was. Never thinking ahead. Always taking everything for granted. Now he understood just how precious a tin of powder and clean, dry socks really were.

He digested that thought as Schoville came staggering from the woods, covered in dirt and leaves.

“By God!” Patrick said, “Where did you get to?”

The man picked a few of the fallen leaves from his shirt and then wiped a sleeve across his damp brow. “I’ve had a bit of an upset stomach.”

Patrick kicked up an eyebrow, but said nothing. He did not want to know the details. What a man did alone in the wilderness was his own business.

“I see you’ve broken down camp,” Schoville said, noticing for the first time that everything was packed and ready to go.

“I didn’t know how long you’d be, so I got started without you.” Patrick bent down and slipped his pack over his shoulders, and then handed Schoville the other two. “I suppose we should move on,” he said, gathering Linley into his arms. “No use in standing around.”

The rain held off for most of the day. Even though the air was humid almost to the point of being unbearable, the men were thankful for the reprieve. The ground was still a sloppy mess, covering their boots in almost ankle deep mud, but at least it was old mud.

But despite everything going in their favor, Patrick, Linley, and Schoville did not make good time.

Patrick limped along, wincing with every step, and Schoville, who normally berated his comrade for slowing them down, lagged far behind with one hand clenched to his stomach and the other clamped over his mouth.

“Can…can we stop for a moment?” he asked. “I need to—”

He could not even wait to finish his sentence before he sprinted off between two thick fir trees and disappeared.

Patrick sighed. At the rate they were going, they would get nowhere before dark. But he might as well use this opportunity to set Linley down for a moment and see to his own needs.

He walked a few paces off. Even unconscious and with her eyes closed, Patrick did not want to risk Linley waking up to find him relieving himself in her presence. As he unbuttoned his trousers, he remembered the advice Schoville gave him about his feet. And, to be honest, Patrick was pretty damned close to pissing on himself if it meant any relief from the pain.

But not even a few weeks in the wilderness could change him
that
much.